Good afternoon. This is the conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the SYS-DAT full year 2025 results web call. All participants are in listen-only mode, and after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Emanuele Angelidis, Vice Chairman of SYS-DAT. Please go ahead, sir.
Good afternoon and welcome everybody to our 2025 earnings call. Today I'm gonna tell you a little bit about our key achievements of last year, then I will hand it to Matteo, our CEO. He will talk us through the main results on the operational side. Andrea, our group CFO, will talk about the financials. Just a quick reminder of who we are. I'm pretty sure that all of you know that, but just to make a quick recap, in case there is somebody who is new, we are a software company developing proprietary software solutions specialized for specific vertical markets. We have a strategy spanning from, you know, a buy strategy on one side and obviously a build strategy on the other one.
On the buy side, obviously what we do is we target potential companies, thanks to the presence we have all over Italy. We tend to acquire them with low EBITDA multiples and also trying to defer the payments. As soon as we start the integration process, we push very hard on the cross-selling and in order for them to adopt our KPIs. On the organic side, as soon as they become part of the group, we push very, very hard on the organic growth. We have obviously as a minimal target to beat the inflation in the Italian ICT market. We do much, much better than that, and we'll see it in a while. We have a lot of KPIs. Obviously, cash flow is one of our main priorities given that we have a buy and build strategy.
What we try to do is to have a high percentage of EBITDA conversion and in cash, obviously. We push very hard on innovation because we are a technological company, so we have to make sure to be always at the edge of innovation. Today I would like to share with you three main takeouts with respect to our results last year. The first one is about growth. 2025 has been a kind of remarkable year in terms of step up the group size. We had an increase in terms of revenue of roughly 56% as a result obviously of the acquisition of A&C group, but also notably thanks to the organic growth, which was almost at 10%, much higher than the Italian ICT growth.
The second message on the top right side is the EBITDA margin we achieved, 19.6%, excluding the one-off A&C M&A expenses. This is again a very good result, taking into account that obviously A&C that has an interesting size compared to the group size, has a lower EBITDA margin, but nevertheless the group performed even better than that. The average is a remarkable number above 19%. The third important element is about the operating cash flow, EUR 13.5 million, roughly. The important thing is that we achieve this number thanks to a very, very high, basically, EBITDA to cash flow conversion of roughly 79%. These are, I would say, the three main elements we should keep in mind.
Strong growth, value creation through high EBITDA margin, and cash flow origination, thanks to the ability to convert a huge portion of the EBITDA. Going into the details, here are the main numbers that then Andrea will explain in detail. Revenue were in the range of EUR 90 million. The EBITDA was EUR 17.1 million. The net income adjusted of EUR 8.7 million. The adjustment is of EUR 1.8 million, which is related to M&A one-off effects in PPA amortization. Obviously, as you know, we acquired at the beginning of last year A&C group, which is a pretty big company, with roughly EUR 25 million of revenue. This had a significant impact on our PPA amortization. The liquidity stayed pretty much stable, so increased by EUR 200,000.
Basically was EUR 48.5 million at the end of last year. This is an extremely important result because this means that the operating liquidity, the cash from operations basically, was enough to pay all the M&A activities we had in 2025, obviously the dividends and obviously also the buyback program. A remarkable result. Our net financial position is still positive, EUR 17.5 million, decreased by EUR 14.8 million. Obviously we have to keep in mind the overall value of roughly EUR 25 million of A&C group that obviously is already accounted within the net financial position.
Putting all these into context, if you look at the top side of the chart, you can see that basically we tripled the size of SYS-DAT Group business since 2021. As you can see, all the main KPIs, revenue, EBITDA, net income tripled over the last four years. Obviously this is a result of our, you know, combined strategy of organic and inorganic. On the bottom left side, you can see the acquisitions. We made more than 20 acquisitions since 2021, including the two latest companies we acquired in February this year. While on the right-hand side, you can see that this organic inorganic growth is always supported by a strong organic growth.
For example, every single year from 2021 to 2025, we outpaced basically the Italian ICT market growth, typically between 1.5 and 2 x. In 2025, we achieved an organic growth of 9.8%, which is basically 70% higher than the Italian market growth. A pretty, you know, interesting result. That's, in terms of, if you like, key takeaways from 2025. I have a very last chart, which is about a topic that everybody is discussing over the past few weeks and months, which is basically AI. Here we want to give you the perspective that SYS-DAT has about AI, what has been done about AI by our company.
First of all, on the top side of the chart, you can see some actions we put in place. As you can see, basically we started talking and investing in AI several years ago. Basically, in 2021 is when we acquired Humatics. Humatics, many of you will remember that, is a company completely dedicated to AI. Since then we started developing solutions, AI solutions that we started selling to the market. More recently, at the beginning of last year, we launched arIA, which is basically a suite of AI vertical solutions for many specific verticals. Later than January, basically, we launched MosAIc, which is an internal project where we have a team of people that is supporting all of our employees to use AI tools in their day-to-day activity.
This spans from obviously technical guys, as you would assume, but also sales people, also staff employees. Everybody has to use AI tools. This is not something that we decided to do nowadays when everybody's talking about AI, but this is a process that started several years ago, as I mentioned earlier. In particular, all of our employees have access to Gemini Enterprise to really perform in a much more efficient way what they do on a daily basis. The result of these activities is that basically we have, as you can see on the bottom left side, a lot of product based on AI solutions. Some specific vertical solutions that we sell to law firms rather than manufacturing companies, retail players, and so on.
Also we have AI smart capabilities that are powering our software solutions, and I mean both core and value-added software solutions, as well as some of the ICT services we provide to the market. AI is not something new for us. It's something that, obviously we are working on since at least five years ago. On the right-hand side, you can see examples of how we use AI in our entire process life cycle. Starting from when we engage with a customer, where obviously we use AI, mainly our salespeople use AI to, you know, do market analysis, competitive analysis, service gap analysis, and so on, to when we start developing the projects where the first step is really working on the gap analysis. Understanding where the customer is compared to where the customer wants to go.
Typically, this was done in the past in a very manual way. Nowadays, it's not like this anymore. Everything is automated. This is reflected also at the project development phase. Basically, when our technical guys start coding, basically, where we moved from a total manual coding to what is now called assisted coding to what is gonna be, is already started, but is gonna be more and more agents, meaning that we will have a library of agents that our technical people will use in order to expedite the software development and also the quality of the software itself. Then the last step as well, which is after sales management, there obviously alongside with chatbots, we have also predictive analytics tool that based on the tickets coming from the customer can anticipate potential problems.
This chart, I think nowadays, is quite important to be shared with you to really tell you a couple of things. First of all, that, as I said already a couple of times, for us, AI is not something new, but it's something we are working since several years ago. Secondly, that for us, sorry, AI is a tool like an email, like a browser, like, you know, a software tool, that we use in order to be much more effective and also gain some efficiency internally. Business as usual, obviously, whoever knows this tool and is in a position to benefit from this tool will have advantage compared to other players that are a little bit late for this. Definitely we believe we are absolutely on time also because we are working on this since many years ago.
Having said that, I would like now to hand over to Matteo, who will go more in depth about what happened, specifically last year.
Thank you, Emanuele, and good afternoon everyone from me too. In the following slides, I will give you an overview of our operational performance for the fiscal year 2025 that, as Emanuele said before, a very important growth. My presentation today focuses on four topics that are essential to our success, and they are the first one about the market with a clear overview of the landscape we are operating in this chart. The second is about our offering with how we are creating value through AI. The third is about our customer with the detailed segmentation, and the last one is about M&A with the positive impact of the two latest acquisition. Let's begin by looking at the market landscape. The
This chart shows at the top the growth of Italian market and ICT services that is, as Emanuele said before, 5.8%, and the CAGR for the period of 2022 to 2025 is 7.8% for ICT services and 4.3% for software solutions, the two segment in which we are operating in. The estimated CAGR for 2025 to 2028 is 5.8% for ICT services and 2.6% for software solutions. This expansion is heavily driven by digital enablers such as big data, cybersecurity, cloud, and finally, last but not least, AI. As you can see at the bottom, the environment sees that in 2025 it achieved an organic growth of almost 10%.
In the specific, 9.8%, which is about 1.7x the market growth rate. We are confident that this growth rate is due to our strategy, which focuses on three pillars. In the bottom, we see our customer base through cross-selling between the companies with new solution, with new services. The second is about our customer base through upselling with new modules, new features of existing solution. The last one is innovation. Thanks to our R&D activities, introducing always new solutions that meet the market's evolving demands. Just to give you an idea, we invest yearly 5% of our revenues and about 10% of our technical personnel costs. In summary, SYS-DAT is strongly present in the growing segments of IT markets, software and ICT services.
The market remains healthy and continues to grow with the digital enablers driving the expansion, which is the leveraging. This slide illustrates our revenue composition for 2025. Here we want to put in evidence the evolution of our segmentation of the three families of our offering. I briefly remind you the three families. The first family is composed by the core business software solution. Here we have our proprietary vertical solutions that manage core processes in our companies, in our customers. The second family is composed by the value-added software solutions. Here we have our proprietary vertical solutions that manage specific processes, and in the last family, we have the ICT services, cross-industry services that enable to better manage the business of our customers.
The first family, the core business software solution, represents 66.5% of our revenues, and this is the bedrock of our operations. The second family represents almost 12% of our revenues, and the last family, the ICT services, represents about 22%. In the right side, we can see our diversified portfolio in vertical markets and some of new customer of the last quarter, like Yamamay, a fashion industry, like panaté, a food company, like Centrufficio , a distribution company, and Ferrovie Emilia-Romagn a, a transportation company. About the evolution of our offering, we are embedding AI across all our offering in two key direction. On the one hand, through AI add-on, like the arIA Suite with specific solutions, and on the other hand, by building intelligence directly into the core of our software.
This transform our solutions from feature-rich to intelligence-rich. The market opportunity that this unlocks for us is really immense. Today, just to give you an idea, less than 5% of our customer base has adopted our AI solutions, and this represents a significant growth potential for our existing customers. We have experienced many moments of IT disruption in our company's long life, like, for example, e-business, mobile, cloud. Time to market has always been much faster than time to adoption. We are absolutely convinced that the very big opportunity we have in the coming years. Summary, our core business is not just stable and diversified, but it's ready to become our engine for exponential growth, and thanks to our AI solution, to a waiting customer base.
This slide shows the composition of our revenues in terms of customer base from different points of view and illustrates the diversification and longevity that provide stability and to our business model. In the top left section, we see revenue by sector. Our well-diversified presence in market sectors such as manufacturing for 45% of our revenues, services with 23%, commerce with 25%, and other sectors like logistics, healthcare, and utilities. This mitigates our business risk in the event of the sector depressions. In the top right section, we see revenues by customer size that is in line with the Italian market distribution.
In detail, 40% of our revenue comes from customers with a turnover greater than EUR 50 million, 28% from customers with a turnover between EUR 10 million and EUR 50 million, 40% between EUR 2 million and EUR 10 million, and only 18% of revenue from customers with a turnover less than EUR 2 million. In the bottom left section, we see the revenue concentration by customers. In 2025, we have increased the diversification of customer revenue concentration. In detail, the top 30 customers represent 22% of our revenues, while the top 10 customers represent 12% of our revenue, and the first one represents only 2.6%. It is not just a customer, but it is, he is a real business partner.
We think that this is a real indicator of a balanced customer portfolio and the absence of a dependency of any single client. Another important element is that we have more than 6,000 customers with a revenue churn rate of 2.2% in 2025. That is well below industry averages. In the bottom right section, we see the quality of our revenues. Our recurring and repeatable revenues increased by 70% from 71 to 83 of our revenues in just one year. In detail, recurring revenues increased from 34 to 41, and repeatable revenues increased from 37 to 42. I remind you that recurring fees are maintenance and outsourcing fees, while with repeatable, we intend revenues coming from customer that have been working with us for more than 5 years.
This context gives us an excellent visibility into the future performance, and it's a testament to the trust they place in our solution and our services. In short, our revenue is not only growing, but it's becoming stronger, more predictable, more resilient year on year. This diversification, high quality of recurring revenues creates a low risk and high visibility platform for our growth, for our business model. In this chart, we see the two strategic acquisition completed in February, and the rationale behind them. The first company is et.ics. et.ics is a company founded in 1997, specializing in cybersecurity services and on-field software with a proprietary solution. This acquisition will bolster our software portfolio and provide a strong platform for critical security services. The revenue in 2025 were about EUR 2.5 million.
The second company is Technis Blu, founded in 2008. Technis Blu brings deep expertise in vertical software market with a particular expertise in SAP with the solution S/4HANA, where we were not present yet. Their clients are medium, large companies in some specific sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, and services. The revenues in 2025 were about EUR 5 million. Combined, these two acquisitions add about EUR 7.5 million in revenues. Looking ahead, our proven make-and-buy strategy remains a central pillar of our growth plan with a strong track record, as Emanuele said before, of successfully integrating acquisitions.
In summary, we can say the operating activities in 2025 performed very well, thanks to our growing offering with specific solution for vertical markets, thanks to our ability to generate the cross-selling and upselling, and thanks to the contribution of M&A activities. Finally, we are firmly convinced that AI represent the real opportunity of the coming years in terms of how much and how we will able to sell to our customer base. This is the overview of our operations from 2025. Now I'll pass the floor to Andrea, who will present our financial data for 2025.
Okay, thank you very much. As you saw from the numbers, from Emanuele's portion, it's been a very strong quarter, Q4, and a very strong year in general, and specifically on all the numbers that we present, starting from the top line. In terms of top line, we have here on the left-hand side, the revenues of the company. The revenues grew from EUR 57.5 million to EUR 89.6 million on a consolidated basis, which is a growth of 56%. This type of growth, of course, includes the acquisition of A&C Group at the beginning of the year.
Even looking at the organic portion of this growth, so even looking at the growth without A&C Group, we can see that the organic revenue grew by almost 10%, which is quite a bit more than the Italian market expected growth of less than 6%, at least looking at, you know, the analysis run by Anitec-Assinform in the latest edition of the market analysis. Now, these top-line results are reflected even more in the EBITDA results. The EBITDA growth year-over-year is almost 50%, 47.6% precisely. If we look at the EBITDA margin, that's a healthy EBITDA margin of 19%.
Excluding the one-off costs of the A&C acquisition, that's growing to 19.6%, which is more or less in line with the 20% historical EBITDA margin that we have. In other words, as you know, we usually pay something in terms of EBITDA margin because of acquisition, because we tend to acquire companies with lower EBITDA margin than our core EBITDA margin. But in this case, we demonstrated then in basically one year, or less than one year, we were able to absorb quite a bit of the difference, even considering the fact that A&C Group had an EBITDA percentage much lower than our own, so around 13%-14%, as an entity or as a group.
Now, look at that in terms of organic EBITDA, so in terms of growth without the acquisition of the last twelve months, that means a growth of 13.5%, excluding again the M&A and the one-off costs, which is again even greater than the organic revenue growth. Now, how does this reflect on the bottom line? In this slide, we see that on the left-hand side, we keep investing in R&D, and in particular, this is all development. The development portion is 4.1% of revenues in 2025, which basically means 32% more than last year.
The R&D activities specifically are, of course, on the usual core business that we have, on the value-added component that we have, and in particular, we are looking at development of AI solutions for vertical markets, as Emanuele was describing, the arIA portion in particular, and also the internal portion of the agents or the integrated portions of AI inside our own products. Even when you look at ERP and CRM and retail, the reality that a piece of that development is actually AI and, you know, BI/AI, so this is all intelligence embedded in those products that we, you know, invest in so that they stay relevant, and we make them more palatable and more sellable to customers. On the right-hand side, net income.
As you can see here, the net income is presented with an adjustment of EUR 1.8 million due to M&A, one-off effects and depreciation, amortization related to PPA. Considering that the growth of the net income on an adjusted basis was almost 40%, and the portion of the net income compared to revenues is almost 10%, which means that the net income is actually reflecting our growth coming from the top line, even considering the additional cost that we had and even consider, of course, additional costs given the fact that we are a listed company, which of course, has a higher cost basis than a non-listed entity.
The net income without those adjustment, you can read it in the slide, is still growing by 11.5%, so we are still absorbing anyway all the additional D&A and additional costs. In terms of liquidity, Emanuele was talking at the beginning about this EUR 200K of liquidity added to the line, even in the presence of a lot of, you know, cash outs. This has been an extraordinary year in terms of acquisitions because of A&C, of course.
If you look at the way we transform liquidity or actually the way we consider here liquidity, and here you have all the details to look at how we go from the EUR 48.3 million of liquidity at the end of last year to the EUR 48.5 million liquidity at the end of 2025. You can see that the cash flow for operation is basically able to cover all the cash outs that are represented mainly by the M&A portion and then by, of course, dividends buyback, and all the rest of the IFRS 16 and other cash items. Specifically, the cash flow for operation was a very healthy EUR 13.4 million.
The cash flow from investment activity absorbed almost EUR 9 million of cash, and that's actually split into the red portion, which is the cash absorbed, and the blue portion, which is the cash consolidated. As you can see here, the acquisition of A&C gave us more than EUR 7 million of additional liquidity, and that helped us optimize the cash flows for this year in terms of M&A. Since the M&A payments were a bit, you know, more than EUR 11 million, but still partially compensated by the EUR 7 million of acquired liquidity. The rest of it is the R&D and CapEx. Here we have EUR 4.7 million of investments. As you can see, it's mostly coming from the R&D expenses.
Now, financing activities, we have the positive portion from the cash invested, which gives us a bit more than EUR 1 million, and the rest is the negative portions are actually dividends for you know last year. 1.3 million, around 1.3 million. The buybacks, the buyback program, which in last year represented a bit more than EUR 1 million. The rest of it is represented by IFRS 16 elements and other cash items. Now, the last slide is about the net financial position, so it's actually the net cash position of the company, of the group. As a reminder, in our net financial position, we have the entire earnouts of the acquisitions, including future estimated payments.
That's a net-net position in terms of cash versus debt. On the left-hand side, you can see the reconciliation of the positive and negative components of the change in net financial position. Of course, we have the positive component of the cash flow from operations. Then we have the negative components of the investments in R&D mostly and the IFRS 16 elements. Then the biggest portion is the almost EUR 19 million of M&A debt, which is, of course, reflected in our accounts. The resulting net financial position is EUR 17.4 million, we still have quite a bit of net cash on hand for more acquisitions.
On the right-hand side, the net cash breakdown in terms of reconciliation between net financial position and liquidity, both at the end of the year. As you can see here, this is a net position. You see that from EUR 17.4 million, we need to add up the components of debt from the earnouts. This includes the fixed portion of the payments and the earnouts, the pure variable portion of the future payments. They're all together.
As you probably remember, we tend to pay the fixed portion in tranches, usually four tranches, and the variable portion is paid during the earnouts period, and it tends to be backloaded in the sense that most of the payment is done at the very end of the period, which is in the fourth year from the acquisition, so after the three-year business plan. Bank loans, we have not very much of those, basically nothing in terms of leverage, which is an additional opportunity for leverage if we need it in the future. Then the rest of it is basically IFRS 16 elements of liabilities for company cars and offices, resulting in the liquidity of EUR 48.5 million at the end of the period.
Okay. Thank you, Andrea. Basically, overall, I would say a very solid 2025 from many points of view. Definitely the growth and value creation, as we have seen, it's a big step up for our group. I would say that also we had very positive signals in terms of offering and how this offering basically covered all the markets we're addressing with the entire product portfolio we have. Obviously, AI nowadays is a topic that everybody's talking about. Honestly, this is something we are working on since 5 years ago, is a tool that we are using. We start seeing on one side the interest of the market, but we also see the huge opportunities we have given that we obviously control this kind of technological opportunity.
We started 2026 with two acquisitions, and we have obviously ongoing conversation with other potential target companies in line with our strategy that, as you remember, are companies that either give us access to new vertical markets or give us access to new solutions that could in some way strengthen our product portfolio. Having said that, we are now available for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To enter the queue for questions, please click on the Q&A icon on the left side of your screen. When announced, please click Continue on the pop-up window. If you are connected in audio only, please press star and one on your telephone. The first question is from Tommaso Nieddu, Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes. Now I can.
Yes. Hello, and thank you a lot for taking my questions. I have a few. The first one is on the current standalone A&C margin, which is already 150, 200 basis points higher than when you acquired it. My question is, what were the specific levers to close that gap and how much you think you can continue to do this for this year? On top of that, would be very helpful if you could give us a bit more color on your current trading at the group level for the first two months.
Second question is on recurring and repeatable revenues, which increased to 83% combined from 79% in the nine months, if I'm not mistaken. Can you help us understand how could you increase this portion so quickly? The third one is on the M&A. You already closed two acquisitions in early 2026, totaling EUR 7.5 million revenues and EUR 0.5 million EBITDA. My question is what is your. If you can give us at least a bit of visibility on what is your current M&A pipeline. Thank you a lot.
Okay. Maybe I can start answering to your questions and then if any of you wanna dig deeper. Starting from the first question, how we managed to increase our new acquired company's EBITDA margin. Basically, we work very hard with them. As I was sharing with you at the beginning, one of the key points as soon as a company becomes part of our group is to work on the integration side of it, which means basically aligning what their KPIs are at the time of the acquisition to what our group level KPIs are. With respect to the margin, there are several things we do, but one which is the you know most used is that since they enter into our group, we push them to increase prices on a yearly basis.
Very often, those companies are not used to go to their customers and say, "Look, from this year, I'm gonna increase the price of my services." After they become part of our group, obviously they have an additional excuse. They go back, or sometimes we go back together to their most important customers, and we explain that the level of risk the customers is running is much, much lower now that the company's part of a much bigger group. In some way, this is represented by additional value, so it's pretty normal that prices should increase over time. In many of our contracts, we have an automatic clause of pricing increase on an yearly basis. That's one of the measures we put in place.
Obviously the cross-selling opportunity is another great opportunity for companies to increase marginality as well because this means selling their products to the existing group customer base that is already used to sometimes to higher level of price. So that's the two, I would say, of the strongest measures we put in place since day one. As probably Matteo was mentioning earlier, this you know is a standardized process we have as soon as the company comes into the picture. So we spend three months to really making sure that they adopt our systems, including an ERP that is covering end-to-end the entire process, and obviously to start using the same practices we use with our customers and potential customers. So that's about the first question. The second question.
repeatable and
Yes.
Recurrent revenues. On this, there are two effects, of course. The first effect is the A&C acquisition, which is of course increasing in the mix the recurring revenue. A&C is a good model in that sense with high recurring revenue. You can see that the, you know, a part of the spike is justified by the fact that we acquired a big group with a higher percentage of recurring revenue. On the repeatable side, again, this is the part of loyal customers.
We keep seeing loyalty from this customer and increasing numbers from the existing customers, which basically is reflected in the fact that the sales are coming, first of all, from those existing customers in a way that is, you know, easy to forecast because it's basically defined year-over-year and multi-yearly through multi-year contracts and through project that are spanning multiple years of, you know, sales. The other portion of the recurring is again a push, which is common in the market, but in particular we see on some ERP components, for example, and certainly on the value-added components that tend to be more and more recurring in nature.
It's not necessarily pure SaaS, but it's certainly recurring in the sense that our recurring contracts tend to be a multi-year recurring contract and tend to have the good, you know, consequence on invoicing. Because, for example, the maintenance fee we can invoice annually, and we invoice them at the beginning of the year. That's giving us positive effects on cash too.
The last question was about M&A. Yes, we have a healthy, I would say, pipeline of potential targets. Just as a reminder for everybody, we are not pressurized about the size of those companies or how healthy are their financials. Obviously, we don't do restructuring, but we are not worried also investing in companies with a lower EBITDA margin compared to the group's level because we are pretty sure that once they become part of the team, obviously they will very quickly adopt our same set of KPIs over time. The kind of companies we are looking at are companies being part of different markets and different size. What we really wanna make sure is that they are company absolutely sharing our industrial project.
This is why, for example, the last two companies we acquired were companies both with new verticals, recurring services, and also interesting technological solutions. We started well, but we still have, you know, a pipeline to work on. We are working on actually.
Okay. Thank you a lot.
You're welcome.
The next question is from Pietro Nargi, Intermonte SIM. Please go ahead.
Do you hear me?
Yes. Now I can hear you.
Okay. Perfect. Hello, everyone. Thanks for the presentation and for taking my questions. Two questions from my side. The first one is on the organic growth. You reported an organic growth close to 10% on full year 2025, which seems to be a strong acceleration in Q4, if my calculations are correct. Could you elaborate more on the main drivers behind this strong performance in terms of organic growth over the quarter? Looking ahead, based on what you are seeing in the first months of the year, would it be reasonable to expect organic growth to remain in the high single digit space also for 2026? The second question is on the customer base.
Previously, you have shown some metrics about revenue chart in full year 2025. Could you comment a bit more on how customers you acquired over the year? Let's say just some stats about the customers' evolution, if you have this. Thanks.
Pietro, just a clarification on this last, the latter question, the second question. You mean, the split, of where the customers are coming from?
If you have any indication about how many customers you acquired, new customers, I mean, in 2025. I mean, I think there is a big portion coming from the acquisition of A&C Holding, but just to have an idea about your customer evolution over the last year. Thank you.
Okay. About the first question, which is about the organic growth. Obviously, as you know, Q4 has a higher seasonality compared to the previous quarters, for many reasons, including the fact that a lot of customers wanna close contracts in the current year to, you know, benefit from potential additional budget they have or budget unspent. Having said that, this combined with the fact that H1 was a little bit under pressure because if you remember as a result of the tariff schemes put in place by the U.S., Q1 and Q2 were a little bit timid because of this.
The combination of this and the, let's say, Q3, which was better, and the big, I would say, additional acceleration in Q4, this is what gave us basically this final result of roughly 10%. Going forward, obviously, we haven't given any guidance that potentially will give it in the next few times. Looking backward, we always performed in the range of 8%-10%. Looking backward, it's not unreasonable. It's not unreasonable, obviously, to think that 2026 will perform like that. I mean, so far the signals seems in line with that.
Just one note on this, and just to express a little bit of color. It seems like the first part of the year was effectively lower than usual, and it was moved to the last part of the year. Sales effectively were slower compared to usual in the first part of the year, and definitely they recover in the last part of the year. That seems to be more of a shift, probably because the budgets were, you know, approved at the beginning of the year but not really used in the first six months, and then used in the last four months of the year, which gave a lot of satisfaction in terms of revenue. That's reflected in the organic growth.
Yes, I can confirm the Q4 was a very good quarter in that sense.
The second question was about new customers. We haven't given any detail, other than basically the total number of customers at the year-end. Obviously, we gained some additional customers, as you can do the math. One of our main focus is obviously cross-selling and upselling because, you know, Italy is extremely under-penetrated, as you know better than we do, in terms of IT services adoption. It's much easier to acquire additional revenue from existing customers than acquiring new customers. Having said that, obviously we got a lot of additional customers in 2025. We haven't given any detail on that. We can think about giving something more in the future.
Okay. Thank you.
You're welcome.
The next question is from Gabriele Berti, Intesa Sanpaolo. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me?
Yeah, very well. Thanks.
Yes. Great, thank you. First question is on AI demand. I was wondering which business area or verticals are currently showing the strongest appetite for AI-enabled solution. When do you think AI could become a more visible contributor to revenue growth? Second question, always on AI. How should we think about your competitive positioning in AI offering versus larger global software vendors? I mean, where can your vertical expertise and customer proximity create a real advantage? Lastly, one on the most recent acquisitions, so ATIX and Technis Blu. Could you please provide some color on their historical growth profile and your expectation now that they are part of your universe?
Also, comment on the expected timing for the emergence of the potential efficiencies and cross-selling opportunities. Thank you.
Yes. Again, I'll start giving an answer and then obviously, you can chip in. Talking about potential markets where we see the most interest coming from with respect to AI solutions. Obviously, it's very early stages. Matteo, sorry, was pointing out we have less than 5% of our customers, you know, being very much focused on AI services because despite a lot of fuss we can have on newspapers, articles, and so on, the reality is that the market is not yet ready for that. Having said that, on our side, we see three areas pretty strong. One is the law firms. I have a lot of lawyers that are interested in applications, specifically in the field of due diligence and also in the field of M&A contract drafting.
These are two areas where obviously law firms spend a lot of time. These are two very time-consuming activities, and obviously AI is very beneficial for them on this. Then we have obviously the manufacturing side of it. Having predictive, you know, maintenance application is extremely beneficial for companies with manufacturing plants because obviously this avoids having unexpected downtime. The third area where we see a lot of interest is everything that has to do with retail and point of sales. There are dynamic pricing tools to define real-time promotion and real-time pricing.
This is very demanding, especially when you have basically the retail market under pressure, because that's a way to be more successful on the market, be more competitive and gain much quickly incremental sales and margins. That's about the first question. The second question was about-
Competitive positioning in AI. Maybe on this one. Bigger software vendor. I mean, if you consider the very big software vendors, those are actually infrastructural play. We are in a sense indifferent because we use whatever they provide. We don't have problems using, say, you know, OpenAI products or, you know, Amazon products, or other types of, you know, infrastructural products that are, you know, more or less related to AI. In that sense, we can use whatever we want, and we don't invest in big, of course, language model, but we use them from others. If you are looking at big vendors, in the sense of system integrators, as Emanuele was saying, customers are still looking around.
They're asking us a lot of questions and asking us some basic solutions for now, and they appreciate the fact that we provide smart or basically smart portion of the software already embedded in our software. Right now, companies on the ground are more worried about the fact that they invested a lot of money and people in learning how to use tools, and they are not that ready to jettison everything and jump onto a bandwagon that is still not demonstrated in terms of real value. We'll see in the future that will change, but for now, we don't see this strong competition in that sense. Again, we are reacting very actively by putting AI, BI, and all sorts of intelligence inside the products or on top of it as additional modules so that we can sell them anyway.
If I can add, what really makes the difference is what you mentioned in your question. Being a vertical expert makes a lot of difference because obviously here is where you can really generate a lot of value for your customer, and having a strong proximity to the customer. That's what really makes the difference because in this case, you have a lot of customers which are still trying to understand what the implications are gonna be and so on. Really they wanna speak and talk to somebody they trust. About the last point, which was how we can see the impact of AI in our accounts.
Obviously, it's a little bit difficult to calculate this because, as we were saying at the beginning, we sell AI as a combination of obviously specific vertical solutions, and we can easily calculate those. Then we also embed the AI's market abilities in our traditional software being core software applications or value-added software solutions or ICT services. For us is, you know, something which is a tool, something that we can use to sell something more and get more interest out there on the market. I think, with respect to the level of communication, the level of understanding and the interest on the market is still far away, at least in Italy.
Last question was et.ics and Technis Blu.
Yes.
Historical growth profile and expectations. Maybe here, of course, it's a bit of a different story for the two companies. et.ics has a history of being a small company, but you know, good numbers and very vertical. That's you know, we want to continue with that. You know, there's only space for growth there in terms of efficiency, especially cross-selling. The last part, Technis Blu is a bit of a different story. That's more you know, for the SAP portion and the vertical software that are both inside the same company. Technis Blu is slightly bigger in terms of size. It demonstrated in the past that it can grow quite big on the numbers.
This is a play on, again, vertical portion of it, and the other portion is the SAP, you know, S/4, which is basically the high-level SAP software, which is still very appreciated in the market and allows us to address, you know, larger customers with bigger projects.
As always, what really makes the difference is the quality of the management team. In both cases, we have a very high level of management team as we had with A&C group. Our expectations are obviously very, very positive.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
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Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
It's been very nice sharing these information with you, and I hope to see you soon in one of our conferences. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.
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